Fri, 17th Nov - Emergency!!!

At Toxic they have a special ability of waiting until the last minute before deciding something is a problem. Worse still, they wait until no-one who knows about the piece of work is present and that it is soooo vital that people have to come in at the weekend to finish it. When Monday comes, it is then still urgent but takes several weeks or even months to arrive at the client.

Today is a prime example. Two people did some work on a security upgrade - let's call it Panther! Now they know all about it and know it inside out 'cos they are good at what they do. Before Panther has started to be tested Toxic decides to move the first person to a new project "Guns and Ammo" 10 miles away. Work starts getting ready to test Panther but the guy, TomTom, left working on it is a contractor (meaning he gets paid lots per hour, especially at weekends). He waits until Friday when the other man guy who worked on Panther and who wrote a special script is now in. He also waits until nearly lunchtime to mention his problem - some servers are not getting the info they need from the script. So TomTom asks me to have a look, but I need to eat first so go to lunch. (I'm odd like that - I have this strange need to eat...)

After lunch he realises that he needs to give me a copy of the script. It does help. So he then mentions that it works fine in the "virtual work-place" but not in the "very nearly the same but not quite work-place". So I realise that the script is fine and it's some difference between the two environments. I am however obliged to help, to make sure the script is not mis-behaving. I spend 3 hrs checking it, testing things and by 7pm (on a Friday) decide to tell the project manager my findings: it is only affecting two or three machines so you can start testing everything whilst we get to the bottom of the mystery. He accepts that but still requires me to come in at the weekend to solve the problem because Panther is really, really urgent and this is an emergency.

Later that evening after a pint of ale, my grey cells twinkle and I realise the error. There is nothing wrong with the script. It is something called DNS that is missing in the pre-testing environment which means that TomTom has not put a magic word somewhere making the script fail. A kind of lazy sabotage, the result of which meaning that TomTom has to work on the weekend and claim extra pay...

It also means Toxic have to pay me extra too which may be a lot easier said than done. Watch this space for the result!